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OT: Other MacBook users...
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 18, 2014 at 04:27 PM
... have you switched to Mavericks? If so, have you found that your machine grinds to a halt sometimes, or runs out of memory way to easily? This has happened to me on both my older MacBook Pro and on my newer MacBook Air. It is quite frustrating at times. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Steve Z.
Posted by Paul Korm
May 18, 2014 at 05:24 PM
I’ve had Mavericks on my MacBook Air (mid-2012 13”) since the first commercial release, and am currently at 10.9.3. The machine has 8 GB memory and a 500 GB SSD. (Since I knew I would use this machine for 8-10 hours a day, I wanted it fully tricked out. It was a good strategy, I haven’t regretting the initial expense.)
I rarely have slowdowns and when I do it is always a run-away application process and not the OS. (E.g., a few months ago a bad release of Crash Plan would go insane and use all memory, requiring a process force-quit.) I do have two recurring OS issues:
The first recurring OS issue is sleep. The machine will freeze on awakening from sleep about 3% of the time—i.e., about once a month. I cannot say for sure that it is a Mavericks issue, but I did have the problem with 10.8—which of course is an inadequate sample.
The second is permissions and/or directory corruption. I boot into the recovery HD partition every two weeks to run Disk Utility from there and repair permissions and the disk. About every six weeks there is corruption in the directory that needs to be fixed, as well as the usual mysterious OS X permissions issues that seem to plague every release. No doubt these are both related to the first issue—bad recovery from sleep causing directory corruption.
I have never lost data or more than 20 minutes work from any of these errors.
Posted by Paul Korm
May 18, 2014 at 05:26 PM
“I did have the problem with 10.8” should be “I did NOT have the problem with 10.8”
Posted by Hugh
May 18, 2014 at 06:01 PM
Steve,
I haven’t so far had problems directly attributable to Mavericks itself. In my desktop I do have - as I say in another thread - 16GB of RAM: I believe that the spec for my Mac Mini sets 8 GB as a maximum, but I’ve found that in order to run Parallels and one or two particular Windows programmes I need 16GB, which the Mac Mini is able to use without trouble.
I have found that, first, Mavericks plus various Mac programmes can easily consume 6 GB, probably 2 GB more than under Mountain Lion - the consumption has progressively increased from 10.9.1 to 10.9.3 - and second that one or two individual Mac programmes when running under Mavericks can start eating up RAM when they didn’t do so previously - even though the versions I have have been upgraded for Mavericks. (I woke my Mac yesterday to find that 12GB of RAM were in use, but I think I know what the ‘culprit’ programme was.)
I’m hoping that, as happened with previous upgrades, these issues will soon settle down.
Posted by Hugh
May 18, 2014 at 06:09 PM
Incidentally, I’ve found it quite useful to keep a ‘memory-meter’ app in my menu bar, which I employ both to keep an eye on how much memory I have in play, and to optimise it on occasion. I know there’s debate about how effective these applications are; all I’ll say is that mine works for me.